ELLE heads to perfume school to learn what it takes to be an aroma enthusiast

The teacher uncaps a small, mysterious glass vial marked No. 25, dunks four paper strips into it, and passes them around the room. My classmates grab the papers and press them to their noses, inhaling vigorously, eyes closed, before beginning to furiously scribble notes. One by one, they reel off their observations. "It's pastel," one offers. "Safe for babies?" says another. "Smells like skin!" interjects a third. The woman beside me leans in for another intense, scrutinizing whiff. Her brow knits. Her nostrils flutter. Her breaths come short and sharp (some kind of reverse supersmellers' Lamaze?). She looks up, triumphant. "It's smooth, like a Japanese stone," she says. "Almond!"

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The teacher smiles at me expectantly. "And you?"

Oh dear. In my notebook, I've written three small words: "I smell nothing."

But then, that's why I came to scent school. Last year, the Parisian institute Cinquième Sens, whose perfume education courses have fine-tuned the noses of industry types from Dior, Chanel, and Cartier, among others, opened an office in Manhattan, where they now offer regular sessions for amateur enthusiasts. I came here because—in spite of the humiliating bout of anosmia just described—I happen to like scent. I take special detours just to walk by the open, fragrant doorway of my local doughnut shop (a whiff of their dulce de leche flavor will bring you to your knees); I appreciatively inhale my Weleda bodywash every morning; I'd like to bottle and bathe in the smell of hot-from-the-dryer sheets. So, yes, I enjoy scent, but recently, that hasn't seemed like enough. I want to be one of those people—like the zealous sniffer in my class—who really experiences it. Remember Paul Giamatti in Sideways, picking up "the faintest soupçon of asparagus" and "just a flutter of, like...nutty Edam cheese" from his pinot noir? People like that sensualists, olfactory hobbyists baffle me. In my wineglass I usually smell one thing: wine. So when I heard about Cinquième Sens, I was dubious. Could a little expert advice really turn my mediocre schnoz into a high-powered smelling machine?

I was already quite certain, after all, that all noses are not created equal. Fragrance consultant Ann Gottlieb's, for instance, is so valuable, she once tried to have it insured by Lloyd's of London. (They said no. "There's no way to objectively measure if it doesn't work," she says.) Gottlieb functions as a sort of translator between the people who actually concoct fragrances and the boldfaced names who sell them. When Marc Jacobs or Calvin Klein or Carolina Herrera want to launch a new eau, they hire Gottlieb, who has an uncanny ability to sniff multiple rounds of submissions from the most prestigious fragrance houses on the planet and discern which ones have what it takes to make it onto a department store shelf.

What's it like to possess that kind of sense? Gottlieb says it took her years, even after she started her own fragrance consulting business, to trust her own ability. Now she says, "when I smell a fragrance, I have an immediate recall of what it is, and I can guess what some of the main notes are." With some, she can even guess which perfumer made it. This facility, she says, is "a gift." But that doesn't mean the rest of us couldn't get there with, say, a couple decades' worth of experience. "Noses are like biceps," Gottlieb declares. "The more you lift weights, the stronger you get. It's the same thing with noses—even yours."

Isn't that sort of like Michael Phelps telling me Olympic gold is just a few swim-team practices away? I suspect that Gottlieb's talent is like that of an elite athlete: highly honed, and at least partially genetic. When I put this question to biophysicist Luca Turin, coauthor of several books on scent, including last year's exhaustive Perfumes: The Guide, he informs me that most of us are, in fact, born with the same basic sensory abilities. He even describes his own sense of smell as "only average."

Turin explains that the brain-nose connection is still a bit of a mystery. Basically, whether we stop to smell the roses or, say, get stuck in an airline bathroom, tiny, smelly molecules get Hoovered into the nasal cavity, an open, egg-shape area located at the very top of the nose, which is carpeted in cilia—tiny, hairlike sensors covered in odor molecule receptors that can differentiate between some 10,000 different aromas.

Exactly how the nose decodes each molecule is the subject of an enduring scent-world debate. The long-standing belief is that odor molecules slot into their corresponding receptors based on their shape, like a lock and key. Turin supports a more controversial theory: that each molecule has a distinct set of vibrations that enables corresponding receptors to recognize and interpret it. Regardless of which mechanism is correct, Turin says what happens next is nothing short of "a miracle." The receptor cell shoots a series of electrical pulses into the brain, and—aha!—we get a whiff of rose (or not).

Fabrice Penot, the co-owner of ultracool New York perfumery Le Labo, supports Turin's belief that a naturally keen nose has little to do with being able to savor (or create) an aroma. "It's true, some people have a very, very sensitive sense of smell, a natural way of identifying scents," Penot says—but even some world-renowned perfumers do not fall into that category. "I'm not naming names," he laughs. "I know some perfumers who are very bad at recognizing ingredients in a perfume—really bad. But they're amazing artists doing beautiful work."

Strengthening one's nose, according to Penot, starts with memorizing basic ingredients. The Le Labo boutique is set up like an old-world perfumer's workshop, allowing customers to educate themselves about the components of their eaus before they buy them. If their Rose 31, for example, strikes your fancy, an assistant will offer you some of its other 30 ingredients to sniff individually: the sharp cumin; the hot, bright pepper; the musky notes, or drydown, that remain after its sweet, fleeting top notes evaporate.

Which brings us back to my day at Cinquième Sens. According to my teacher, Patricia Choux, the perfumer who created Michael Kors Very Pretty and Jo Malone Blue Agava & Cacao, while we are born with the ability to smell, we are not, of course, born knowing what it is that we're smelling. Instead, the brain memorizes each new molecule as we encounter it and files it away by experience. As a hungry baby associates the note of vanillin in milk with relief, when we reencounter a scent, we often recall its original connotation. Even a scent you can't put your finger on is probably lurking in back corners of your brain's filing cabinet.

This may explain why odors are so difficult to discuss or describe: Since each one is attached to a memory, each of us, in a way, has her own sense of smell and a different language for expressing it.

There's also the fact that we simply don't grow up talking about smells. Any child with a box of Crayolas can identify a color as esoteric as Burnt Sienna, but "when it comes to what you smell, most people have four words: good, bad, strong, sweet," Choux says. Cinquième Sens, instead, teaches pupils to dissect scents using the vocab of our other senses: If a smell was a color, which would it be? What kind of shape would it have? What type of music would it sound like? Chances are, she maintains, one of these mental images will jog the memory of what you're actually smelling.

We soon learn that many of the ingredients in a perfumer's palette are downright appalling. A vial of musk, for example, is rank, like the subway on a hot afternoon. Heliotrope, a key note of the sublime Guerlain L'Heure Bleue, reminds one of Play- Doh. Choux passes around a small tub of brownish, thick goo that is stomach-turning: dirty diapers, but worse. It's civet, an extract from the perineal gland of an African mongoose. (Most modern perfumers use a synthetic version. We were lucky enough to get a very old sample of the real thing.)

But just when I'm on a roll, another mystery note stumps me.

"It's like biting a piece of tinfoil," offered one classmate.

"It's shaped like the top of the Empire State Building," says another.

Choux tells us it's an aldehyde, a synthetic molecule invented in 1903 and famously used in Chanel No. 5. In my notebook, I write: "faint, metallic, cold, alien, unfamiliar. Chemical, like the scent of the paper itself, intensified." Take that, Paul Giamatti!